A bill addressing Louisiana's sinkholes cleared a Senate panel Wednesday after being whittled down to prohibit issuing permits for hydrocarbon storage, such as natural gas, in state-owned bodies of water near manmade disasters.

Senate Bill 200 by Sen. Fred Mills, R-Breaux Bridge, would bar state officials from issuing new permits to store hydrocarbons and hazardous waste in state-owned bodies of water where the underlying salt rock has failed because of a manmade error.

The bill exempts bodies of water owned by the United State Petroleum Reserve or any entities regulated by the Offshore Terminal Authority.

Mills said he introduced the legislation after being approached by some of his constituents concerned about gas bubbles in Lake Peigneur in Iberia Parish. The lake sits on top of a salt dome that is used to store natural gas, he said, and has been used to store waste and hydrocarbons such as natural gas and carbon dioxide.

Citing a 13-acre sinkhole in Assumption Parish believed to have been caused by a failed brine cavern drilled into the Napoleonville salt dome, Mills said he wanted to prevent a similar disaster from happening in his district.

The sinkhole, which first appeared last August, has resulted in the forced evacuation of 350 people from the nearby town of Bayou Corne. Locals had been reporting bubbling and tremors in the area for months before the sinkhole swallowed up several acres of land and trees.

Mills said there were already two massive storage facilities in the salt dome under the lake. "It's going to happen," Mills said of a similar situation happening in his parish. "We come here to protect he public."

Opponents of the regulation argued that the Assumption Parish sinkhole wasn't caused by the storage caverns in the salt dome, and barring companies from using the salt domes to store hydrocarbons would hurt the state's economy.

The original bill would have barred new permits for underground storage or new underground reservoirs and caverns that are near disasters both manmade and natural. Mills took out the provision about natural structural failures after opponents said almost all salt domes have experienced some sort of natural failure at some point.

The bill passed the Senate Committee on Natural Resources, 4-2. Sens. Gerald Long, R-Winnfield, and Sen. Norby Chabert, R-Houma voted against it. It now moves to the Senate floor.